Violence in the City of Women

Brazil's innovative all-female police stations, installed as part of the return to civilian rule, mark the country's first effort to police domestic violence against women. This vividly detailed, accessibly written study explores this phenomenon as a window onto the shifting relationship between violence and gendered power struggles in the city of Salvador da Bahia. Sarah J. Hautzinger asks what it has meant to criminalize violence in a community in which women have traditionally controlled important informal economic, religious, and domestic spheres, yet have faced comparatively high rates of domestic violence. In a lively narrative that is both ethnographically and theoretically rich, she brings together voices that are often held distinct--unexpectedly macho policewomen, the battered women they are charged with defending, indomitable Bahian women who disdain female victims, and men who grapple with changing pressures related to masculinity and honor. What emerges in this groundbreaking study is a view of Brazil's policing experiment as a pioneering, and potentially radical, response to demands of the women's movement to build feminism into the state in a society fundamentally shaped by gender.

Sarah J. Hautzinger is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Colorado College